Google removes false Altman death claim from search

Google has removed false information from its search results that declared OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman dead, after vandalism of public information sources fed incorrect data into one of the search engine’s prominent information panels.
The error appeared on August 12, when searches for Altman displayed a death date of August 12, 2026. Screenshots of the result spread rapidly across X and Reddit before Google corrected the entry several hours later. Altman is alive, and there was no credible report supporting the claim displayed by the search engine.

Google said the false information had disappeared and stressed that the entry had not been manually changed by its staff. The company said vandalism of public information sources can affect material appearing in Search, pointing to a weakness created when automated systems absorb information that has been maliciously altered elsewhere on the web.

Evidence from Wikipedia’s public editing history showed that Altman’s biography was repeatedly targeted on Wednesday. One edit at 9.47 am UTC falsely stated that the OpenAI chief had been assassinated and had died that day. The information was reverted at 10.29 am, leaving the fabricated claim visible on Wikipedia for about 42 minutes.

Other disruptive changes followed. Editors altered Altman’s surname, inserted another false death claim and changed biographical details before Wikipedia volunteers restored the page. Twenty-two edits were logged on the biography during the day, compared with only five updates since the beginning of August before the vandalism episode.

Wikipedia subsequently placed the page under semi-protection. That restriction requires accounts editing the page to be at least four days old and to have made at least 10 edits. The changes targeting Altman were reversed within periods ranging from one minute to 43 minutes, illustrating both the speed with which misinformation can be inserted and the capacity of volunteer editors to remove it.

The timing strongly indicates that vandalised Wikipedia information contributed to Google displaying the false death date, although Google did not identify Wikipedia as the specific source responsible. The company’s Knowledge Panels draw automatically on a broad range of public, licensed and other information sources, with Wikipedia among the commonly used references.

The episode also exposed a verification problem for search systems that present structured information as an authoritative answer. Google’s panel briefly displayed a prominent death field while continuing to describe Altman as OpenAI’s current chief executive and using present-tense biographical language elsewhere on the same page.

The incorrect entry was part of Google’s conventional Knowledge Panel rather than an AI Overview or an answer generated by the company’s AI Mode. That distinction places the focus on automated data extraction and Google’s Knowledge Graph infrastructure rather than a hallucination produced directly by a generative artificial intelligence model.

A separate false claim involving Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei was also reported on Google Search on Thursday. Social media users shared screenshots suggesting that Amodei had died, extending concern that prominent technology executives were being targeted by fabricated information capable of spreading from editable public sources into search products.

Amodei remains Anthropic’s chief executive. The company continues to identify him in that role, and he has been actively involved in public policy debates surrounding artificial intelligence, including the regulation of open-weight models and security risks from increasingly powerful systems.

The incidents highlight an increasingly important distinction between the speed of automated information systems and the slower process of establishing whether an extraordinary claim is true. Search engines increasingly answer questions directly through panels, summaries and generated responses, reducing the need for users to visit the underlying websites where context, sourcing and corrections may be visible.

Google allows users to report inaccurate Knowledge Panel information and says material that violates its policies can be manually removed when identified. Yet the Altman episode demonstrates how a short-lived alteration on an upstream source can gain much wider visibility when automatically reproduced by a platform used by billions of people.

For Wikipedia, vandalism has long been an unavoidable consequence of allowing broad public participation in editing. Automated tools and volunteer editors are designed to identify and reverse malicious changes, but even a brief window can become significant when other platforms continuously ingest and redistribute the information.